The second creation story.

Genesis 2.4-17.

Back in college I took a Pentateuch class—πεντάτευχος/pentátefkhos being Greek for “five cases,” i.e. the five boxes in which the five “books of Moses,” the Torah, were kept. It was a fun class; our professor got us up to speed on what current bible scholars, both conservative and liberal, taught about the Torah. And occasionally he’d drop facts on us which we’d never noticed before. Like how Genesis has two creation stories: The six days of creation, Ge 1.1 – 2.3 and how Adam and Eve came to be—then be banished from paradise. Ge 2.4 – 3.24

Yep. First he had us read the first story, then stop; then pointed out how the first story never refers to God as the LORD—but this next story does, throughout. And is more of an answer to the question, “Why didn’t God, who’s such a good, wise, benevolent Father, make the earth a suffering-free, death-free paradise for us?” Well… it turns out he did. But we completely f---ed it up.

The six days of creation are a rebuttal to ancient middle eastern myths about creation. This second story has a whole different point. Same as the first story, it’s not a scientific explanation for creation; it’s not about how God did it, but that he did it, and why. We can figure out how with research and experiments—and by avoiding the Creation Museum, which only wants your loyalty to their anti-evolutionary theories, and of course your money.

Because the second story refers to יְהוָ֥ה אֱלֹהִ֖ים/YHWH Elohím, “the LORD God” throughout, and not just Elohím, “God,” like the first story, many biblical scholars figure it was obviously composed by a different author than the guy who wrote the first story. Probably. But one guy assembled all those stories into Genesis, so that’d be the author of Genesis—who wrote the book after there were kings in Israel. Ge 36.31 So, not till the 12th century BC… so definitely not Moses ben Amram, who lived in the 15th century. But I usually call the author “Moe” anyway.

And here’s where Moe tells the second creation story.

Genesis 2.4-17 KWL

4These are the stories of the skies and the land

in the day of their creation.

The god YHWH made land and skies,

5and every domestic plant before it was in the land,

and every domestic herb before it sprouted.

For the god YHWH didn’t yet bring rain to the land,

and no human to work the soil.

6Instead a water vapor came up from the land,

and gave a drink to all the surface of the soil.

7The god YHWH shaped the human

out of dust from the soil.

He breathed into the human’s nostrils a breath of life,

and the human was now a living soul.

8The god YHWH planted a garden in Eden,

in the east,

and there he put the human

which he shaped.

9The god YHWH sprouted from the soil

every pleasant-looking tree, good for food.

And the tree of life in the middle of the garden—

and the tree of knowing good and bad.

10A river flowed out of Eden to give the garden a drink.

It divided from there to be four heads.

11One is named Pišón.

It surrounds all the land of Havilá, which has gold.

12The land’s gold is good.

Fragrant resin and onyx stones are also there.

13The second river is named Gikhón.

It surrounds all the land of Cuš.

14The third river is named Khiddeqél.

It flows in front of Assyria.

The fourth river is Perát.

15The god YHWH took the human

and rested him in the garden of Eden,

to work it and watch it.

16The god YHWH ordered the human,

saying, “Eat, eat of every tree in the garden!

17Don’t eat from the tree of knowing good and bad.

For the day you eat from it, you die, die.”

Adam.

Young-earth creationists are fond of pointing to this part of the bible, and saying, “See?—here’s proof humans didn’t evolve from other creatures. Adam’s a special creation of God. Made from the dust of the earth!” To them it’s far better that we’re made from dirt than apes.

I’ve already pointed out the first creation story is obviously not meant to be interpreted literally. Same with the second story, ’cause you notice it proceeds to give us some impossible geography. It describes a river which splits into four rivers. That’s not the impossible part; the impossible part is when we try to identify these rivers. We end up in four very different parts of the middle east. And none of these rivers share a common source.

• PIŠÓN (Hebrew פִּישׁ֑וֹן, KJV “Pison”). Josephus believed Pišón was the Ganges, though a number of today’s scholars postulate a now-dried-up river in Kuwait and Arabia which once flowed past a gold deposit.
• GIKHÓN (גִּיח֑וֹן, KJV “Gihon”) surrounds Cuš, which most bibles translate “Ethiopia,” which’d make Gikhón the Nile. Some commentators insist that’s the wrong Cuš entirely; it refers to the Cassites of western Iran, and Gikhón is some Iranian river.
• KHIDDEQÉL (חִדֶּ֔קֶל, KJV “Hiddekel”). Many bibles translate this as “Tigris,” and that “Assyria” really means the Assyrians’ original capital. Meh; maybe.
• PERÁT (פְרָֽת, KJV “Euphrates”). Most bibles likewise translate this as “Euphrates,” which passed through the Babylonian empires, and now Iraq.

Most young-earthers insist these four widely-apart rivers did share a common source back around creation, before the flood. But—to use a phrase Ken Ham is mighty fond of saying—they weren’t there, so they can’t know. It’s far more likely we’re misidentifying all these rivers, and post-flood, none of these rivers or lands exist anymore. Eden included. So don’t bother trying to track down its location; you’re not gonna find the lost tree of life.

Well. Whether God specially created Adam—or, alternately, plucked him out of whatever tribe of apes he was in, determined this was gonna be the first of the tribe of humanity, breathed an immortal soul into him, then plunked him down in Eden—I’m not gonna insist upon. I don’t care. However God created him, he got him, and Adam is the progenitor of humanity. And the one who bollixed things for the rest of us; and really, apart from Jesus, I’m not wholly sure any other human would’ve done any better than the two who were there.

We tend to call this first human “Adam,” and the KJV frequently translates אָדָ֛ם/adám as “Adam.” But properly adám means “human, humanity.” I keep translating it as “the human” because unlike nearly every other name in the Old Testament, Genesis calls him הָֽאָדָ֛ם/ha-adám, “the adám”—the human. Other names don’t get a “the” before their names. So the author of Genesis isn’t calling Adam by name; he’s calling him by his species.

But his name is Adam. When Genesis gets to Adam’s descendants, suddenly he’s not “the adám” anymore; he’s just Adam. The rest of the bible calls him Adam. But from time to time, when the scriptures wanna refer to our species, to humanity, people are called adám. God regularly calls Ezekiel “Son of Adam,” which the KJV translates “Son of Man,” Ek 2.1 to emphasize his prophet’s humanity. Arguably Jesus constantly refers to himself that way to do the very same thing.

Of course Adam wasn’t created as an afterthought, nor with nothing to do. God gave him a job straight away: He created a garden for Adam—and in the ancient middle east, gardens weren’t decorative things, like a nicely landscaped backyard, but where you grew your food. You’d grow your fruit trees and vegetables there. And that was Adam’s entire job: Here’s your food, and lots of it, and well-watered. Eat all of it you want. Keep the place up!

Well, but there’s that one tree. And that part of the story comes later.

And there’s the tree of life, right in the middle of the garden, nice ’n obvious. Which Adam was definitely not forbidden to eat! It’s heavily implied if Adam ate of it, or kept eating of it, he’d live forever, Ge 3.22 which wasn’t an issue so long that he never ate of that other tree. You should already know the story by now: Adam totally did, so God had to forbid him access to the tree of life Ge 3.23-24 until New Jerusalem. Rv 22.2

But you can see the original goal was for Adam to live forever. Humans were never meant to die. Various Christians claim nothing died before Adam ate from the wrong tree, but that’s naive of them. Other things have to die in order to keep the ecosystem working. Detach fruit from a tree and it dies. Carnivores need to kill and eat other animals. Fungi need something dead to grow upon. Adam wasn’t wholly unfamiliar with the concept of death; it’d hardly be a deterrent if he had no clue what his Father meant by “die”! But he had a tree of life in his garden: Death was never meant to affect him. Or humanity.

It’s why, even though everything else in the world dies, death strikes us humans as so unnatural and wrong: It is.